DOE, commercial partners start world’s largest carbon capture project

Emissions from a coal plant will be captured and used to liberate oil.

Earlier this week, the US Department of Energy announced that work has started on what when finished will be the world's largest carbon capture facility. Located in Thompsons, Texas, the project will capture a portion of the emissions from the coal-fired W.A. Parish Generating Station. The CO2 will then be compressed and piped to the West Ranch oil field, where it will be injected under ground. This will help liberate oil that's otherwise difficult to extract, but has the added benefit that the carbon dioxide typically stays underground, sequestered.

Further Reading

Although a few projects are going forward, the tech remains stuck in neutral.

The project was originally planned as a small pilot that would only extract CO2 from the equivalent of 60 megawatts of the plant's 3,500MW of generating capacity. When it was realized that the amount of CO2 from 60MW of would be too little CO2 to supply the oil field's needs, the project scope was expanded to 240MW. At that scale, the facility would become the largest of its type in the world.

The exhaust gas will have its sulfates removed before being bubbled through a solution of amines, which will bind the CO2. Once separated from the rest of the gasses, the carbon dioxide will be released by heating the amine solution, which can be recycled. The CO2 is then sent under pressure via a pipeline.

Although carbon capture and storage has been included in many future energy scenarios, the technology itself hasn't been tested at scale. Pilot programs have worked, and the chemistry of the reactions is well understood, but there's been nothing to offset the cost of adding an additional step to generating electricity. This is a rare case where there's a clear, economic use for the carbon dioxide, and so should provide a valuable test.